Then we have the gastro experts who tell us that if you eat the right foods you don’t need any vitamins. They could be right, but are we real clear on which right foods we should eat. I’m not.

Yes, we can work out that eating too many hamburgers and fries is probably not good for our health. But do we really know if fresh vegetables are better than frozen vegetables..? Do we really understand PH readings and whether we are too acidic in our regular diet. Can we test our PH values easily..?

The questions about which supplement to take is as old as Egypt. Even those folks knew that their diets needed some additional form of tonic, or boost. They knew that long life was not guaranteed from eating habits alone. They didn’t have many, if any, chemical ingredients to deal with. They could eat fresh grown produce without fear of toxic imbalances.

Ancient Egypt had its problems about medical issues, many of which, today, we classify as minor irritations. So they won the vitamin/eating battle, but lost the medical one. Who is better off, them or us..?

Ideally of course we demand the best of all worlds. We want best medical care and proper foods. We know how to take care of our intake, and rely on the medical profession to fix it for us, if we don’t know.

If only we could have a litmus test of saliva let’s say, which would tell us precisely which vitamins we need for our own body, not some generic, random guesswork that we ourselves have to make standing in front of the vitamin shelves at the local pharmacy.

The array of supplements is simply staggering. Have you ever taken the time to read the labels on supplements to see if maybe it IS what you need? Could you even tell the difference between what IS good for you and what would be utterly useless..?

Would it not just be easier to say, “I’ll have the lot” In that way then surely your body would know what it likes, what it dislikes or what it has no use for. Or is that just too simple..?

Then again, the more likely scenario is that you see a bottle of something, read the label, determine that it might be just what you need, then check the price and declare, “Nah, I’ll get this from the foods I eat”.

In other words, we determine our vitamin needs by (a) the strength and believability of supplier advertising, and (b) price.

One response to “Retirement Happiness Volume 2 – Issue 3”

Good comments, Bill. I get the impression folk think of providers of supplements as wise health gurus giving selfless advice. But they usually have something for you to buy with various reasons why it costs more than a generic product in a drug store. Like the drug store, they have a commercial motive no matter how genuine their recommendations.